


A Whole Lotta History

by tanyart



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Love at First Sight, M/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-14
Updated: 2016-08-13
Packaged: 2018-08-08 15:04:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7762507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tanyart/pseuds/tanyart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gabriel Reyes falls in love and gets mad about it for several months, the romantic-comedy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Whole Lotta History

**Author's Note:**

> Kinkmeme Prompt: _"Anything about pre-fall Gabriel having a huge gay crush on Jack and having a crisis over it, because blushing and staring after the blondest most handsome man can ruin anyone's dark edgelord image."_
> 
> I apologize for the snail pace! I left the original draft on AO3 for so long it deleted itself out of shame, so here I am, with the edits. Also, there will be some canon divergence since I originally wrote this the week after Overwatch came out and damn if I am going to rewrite all my awful humor now.
> 
> Title is from One Direction's only one true song, _[History](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjmp8CoZBIo)_. My personal r76 anthem, which is just as embarrassing as you'd think it would be.

The concrete training room is nondescript as can be, nothing but gray and maybe a lighter shade of gray paneling to shake things up a bit. Gabriel is standing in a room filled with twenty or so other people, though his natural paranoia counts exactly twenty-two, with more coming through the door (so make that twenty-three, twenty- _four_ ). The singular door could have been an entrance or an exit, depending on his fluctuating level of optimism, and it’s beginning to look more like an exit the longer Gabriel waits.

He assesses each person that comes into the room. None of them look any special to him, but maybe that had been a requirement, along with an exemplary military (or criminal) career at least a hundred miles long. Everyone appears as nondescript and plain as the room, all dressed in their dark military jumpers and not a collar or cuff out of place. Gabriel finds it hard to believe they all had been chosen for the Soldier Enhancement Program. But then again, he had been chosen. 

It’s a given not all of them are going to make it out, but Gabriel’s going to make damn well sure he’s coming out on top. 

Still, he doesn’t know how many super soldiers the government already has. He doesn’t know if he’s part of the first batch, the last, or somewhere safely in the middle. Of course, they’re not calling it the _Super Soldier program_ , exactly, but Gabriel has read every word of the contract ( _arduous_ ), the waiver ( _long-winded_ ), the terms and conditions ( _almost unreadable_ ), and the very fine print ( _ten pages long_ ) before signing his name. It’s the type of shady experimental program he knows the international unified governments like, and he’s pretty sure he’s had a hand in getting it started, years before he was sensible enough to question his own missions. 

It’ll probably involve drugs. Testing and wires. More combat training. New tech. Confinement. The doctors are probably going to know them by some arbitrary subject number. And best of all, no outside contact for months, which is _Nice_. It’s perfect for Gabriel, and if he comes out of it a better weapon with super powers then that was only a bonus. He’ll probably end up nameless by the time they’re through with him, but maybe they’ll give him a cool codename, if he can think of one. Hell, he even doubts he’ll have human emotions after this. 

Twenty-four human experiments in total, all lined up without being told. It’s as silent as the grave. Gabriel is about to write all of them off when the door opens again. 

Through it, the most blond-haired, blue-eyed specimen walks in. 

Gabriel immediately thinks, _‘Wow, okay. So they can modify soldiers to make them devastatingly handsome too.’_

But no. The thought only lasts the half-second it takes for Gabriel to double check the newcomer’s rank insignia in disbelief. He learns the other man is just another super soldier trainee like him. 

Then Gabriel is thinking, _what the fuck? No way. No fucking way._

Gabriel is too hardened and stoic for his expression to even twitch, but he glances at the identification patch—which honestly seems like a huge oversight for a super secret government program— and reads the name _Morrison, J._ , like it’s the physical manifestation of his doom. 

Because _Morrison, J._ is impossibly good-looking. Impossibly. It has to be scientific engineering. The guy looks like something straight out of those early 2000s superhero movies Gabriel’s parents used to watch. Television ads. Fashion magazines. Movie stars. Everything about the guy’s appearance seems manufactured, perfect from his neatly combed hair—not within military regulation, by the way—and his self-assured air of confidence. 

And Gabriel can’t take his eyes off him, not for all the fucking discipline in the world. Even Morrison’s serious and austere face is something nice to look at. Of course, no one in the room is _smiling_ , not with the new CO walking in with a couple of scientists, but Gabriel is stricken by the sudden idea that if this Morrison guy ever did aim a smile at him, Gabriel is going to be a dead man. 

He mentally stamps out image. He stomps on it so hard he feels pretty much ready to kill the blond handsome fucker if his new CO so much as utters the vaguest command. 

Lucky for him, one of the scientists begins to speak, and Gabriel’s gaze tears away from Morrison to listen to how they’re all going to be tortured for the next few months. 

Morrison stands next to him, unknowing, and Gabriel is beginning to think torture is turning out to be a very real possibility. 

* * *

Gabriel is a tortured, dead man. 

Briefing is over and the entire group is dismissed for lunch, as casual as a cadet’s first day of boot camp. Gabriel is prepared for the mess hall’s omnic workers to suddenly come at them with guns and lasers, but no such thing happens. He assumes the rest of the candidates think the same thing, because when the first trainee sits down and takes a bite of her food, she snorts. 

“Well, if the food is poisoned, at least it’s good.” 

Her comment gets a few uneasy smiles or really sincere-sounding chuckles, depending on which ones had made their career out of being spies or undercover agents. Gabriel himself had primarily been in Special Ops. Not much spying there, only direct combat. 

From the corner of his eye, he sees Morrison smile, subdued and grim as he picks up his own lunch tray. It’s probably not his smile at full potential but the sight of it hits Gabriel like a grazed bullet to the face. For a moment, Gabriel stares and it’s enough for Morrison to catch his gaze and offer another smile, this time more open and friendly. 

Gabriel takes the blow at full force and is rendered paralyzed. Socially. 

“What are _you_ looking at?” he snaps, because years of Special Ops work can’t be undone. All he ever did was yell or snarl or ask questions while holding some kind of torture device to some person’s body. And he can’t do any of that to Morrison. Not yet. 

Instead, he quickly calculates the damage of gaining the instant reputation of being a complete _asshole_ and mitigates most of it by taking his tray and sitting in the far corner of the mess hall. The problem, though, is that the mess hall is only designed for about thirty people. The far corner is also happens to be the entrance _and_ exit, and Gabriel isn’t going to quit the field entirely. Only retreat and regroup, which is a completely valid strategy. 

The second problem is Morrison following him, looking ready to fight. Absolutely ready to fight. Gabriel can see it in his stance and the way he lifts his chin by a slight margin. Gabriel can read a lot of things about the human body, so he knows Morrison is willing to throw a punch at a moment’s notice. 

With all this and more in mind, Gabriel calmly sits down at his table as Morrison looks down at him. 

“What’s your problem?” Morrison asks, still holding on to his tray, which would look silly to a regular person but Gabriel has personally seen some nasty killings involving lunch, with and without trays. 

“None of your business,” he says, digging into his food, and becomes irritated when Morrison only leans over him. 

Their confrontation has everyone’s attention, or at least curious looks. None of them look particularly surprised, not even Gabriel. Alpha dog posturing is as common as dirt in the military, and Gabriel is no stranger to facing it head on. 

“You’ve been staring at me the moment I got here, so yeah, I’d call it my problem,” Morrison says. His voice is low and gravelly, which makes Gabriel even more livid. 

“Well, hate to break it to you, but _everyone’s_ been staring at you,” he says flatly. 

_That_ gets the whole mess hall’s attention quicker than a punch. Those that had been pretending to ignore the whole thing are now looking at them with sharp interest. Gabriel can feel the gazes of more than a dozen spies, soldiers, agents, and ex-criminals bearing down on him, and he almost smiles. Special Ops might have done him wrong in the communications department, but he hadn’t gotten so far just from luck. Just keen observation can be enough to win a fight. 

Morrison blinks, expression blank, and Gabriel can tell he’s reassessing the whole situation. The gears click into place and Morrison frowns, but not before a flood of color touches his ears and cheeks. Gabriel also frowns, but for entirely different reasons. 

“Have they? I didn’t notice. If I’ve been conducting myself wrongly then I would appreciate some advice,” Morrison says, stiff and formal. He is speaking to Gabriel, but the way his voice carries is deliberate. It is clear he is addressing everyone in the room. 

Gabriel feels the world slip under his feet. A more cynical person could assume Morrison had calculated the remark in order to appear more appeasing, but even Gabriel can hear every earnest and sincere note in his words, compounded by the fact that the other man looks genuinely ready to listen to any advice anyone has to offer. It’s a special, rare brand of honesty that completely floors Gabriel, makes him gape and stare a little, and he’s not so socially inept that he can’t read the entire room at that moment either. Gabriel doesn’t need to turn around and look; he already knows Morrison has endeared himself to every single person in the mess hall, for good or for worse. 

“Goddammit, Morrison,” a trainee calls out, breaking the silence. His identification patch reads _Jiang, A._ “It’s because you’re so fucking gorgeous. That’s why we’re all staring.” 

“You goofy fuck, you can’t give advice for being beautiful,” another one tells him. Calloway. Whose work Gabriel is familiar with. She has done most of it in diplomatic relations. And not-so-diplomatic relations. 

“Speak for yourself,” Morrison replies, quick to pick up a peace offering and quicker to show he can take a joke. Calloway laughs to the sound of drawn out _oohs_ , as if the mess hall had suddenly turned into a middle school cafeteria, and waves him away. 

Obviously Morrison had not done his work in spying or Special Ops. Not with his… attitude. Not with that kind of do-gooder air reeking about him. Gabriel assumes the man had came straight out of the officer ranks of some military branch, probably under the recommendation of good leadership and apparently good moral character, which under normal circumstances Gabriel would scoff at. Normally. He is too busy hunching over his food to scoff, because Morrison has finally taken his seat in front of him, evidently too exasperated to move anywhere else. 

“Unbelievable,” Morrison mutters to himself, but his face is composed and no longer red. 

Judging by how unperturbed he seems about half the trainees checking him out, Gabriel gets the nasty suspicion Morrison is very aware of his good looks, though he clearly had not expected it to have a significant effect on a bunch of combat veterans. He wonders if Morrison has ever used his good looks as some form of manipulation or seduction on purpose. It seems like the most obvious thing to do. Hell, Gabriel would do it himself if he had the skill to scrape up a decent smile. 

“I guess I was a little too keyed up after briefing,” Morrison says, by way of apology. “No hard feelings?” 

It would be stupid to tell him off. Not with everyone unofficially aligned with him. Gabriel is more than great at surviving, but he isn’t an idiot to stack the odds against his already shitty hand. 

“None,” he replies, trying to keep the angry resignation from his voice. He almost fails, because even his normal speaking tone leans heavily on the side of sarcasm. He tries again, mustering every bit of friendliness he knows. “Nah, we’re good.” 

Morrison regards him with a mild look of surprise, and Gabriel realizes he is smiling. Him. Smiling. _At someone._ He feels it right on his own mouth and cheeks and everything. And it probably looks stupid. Gabriel wants to wipe his own damn face off the entire planet for its betrayal. 

“Great,” Morrison says. He returns Gabriel’s smile, naturally, and tops off the disaster by sticking out his hand to shake. “I’m Jack.” 

_Holy shit, no,_ Gabriel thinks, but out loud he sounds nonchalant. “Gabriel.” 

“Gabriel,” Morrison repeats, which could possibly the rudest thing he could have done; it makes Gabriel’s pulse race and hands sweat against Morrison’s open palm. “Nice to meet you.” 

God, he is a dead man.


End file.
